NewsWrap
for the week ending January 4th, 1997
(As broadcast on THIS WAY OUT Program #458,
distributed 01-06-97)
[Compiled & written by Cindy Friedman, with thanks to Brian Nunes, Jason Lin,
Ron Buckmire, Graham Underhill, Mark Proffit, Alejandra Sarda, Rex Wockner,
Lucia Chappelle and Greg Gordon]
Argentina 's second-largest city has become its second to enact protections
from discrimination based on sexual orientation. The city of Rosario in the
state of Santa Fe has banned discrimination based on gender, physical
appearance, nine other categories, and the catch-all phrase "or any other
circumstances." Rosario has also declared it will promote "the removal of
any and every type of obstacle that actually restricts equality and freedom
and may impede a person's full development and her/his effective
participation in the social, political or economic life of the community."
Rosario's guarantee of what's called "the right to be different" was
proposed by the local gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender group Colectivo Arco
Iris, who modeled it after a law enacted by Buenos Aires in late August.
The U.S. state of Colorado this week paid out $950,000 for the legal costs
of the plaintiffs who successfully sued to overturn Amendment 2, the ballot
initiative passed by voters in 1992 to prohibit civil rights protections for
gays, lesbians and bisexuals. The six legal groups involved in the case had
originally sought 1.4 million dollars for the original 3-week trial in Denver
District Court, appeal to the Colorado State Supreme Court, and appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court, including photocopying, expert witnesses, and other costs
in addition to attorneys' billable hours. It's as big a payment as anyone
remembers Colorado making in a civil rights lawsuit, and apparently not
out-of-line with other attorneys' costs in pursuing a case from pre-trial
through a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Colorado's own legal costs in
unsuccessfully defending Amendment 2 ran to at least another $420,000, while
the national boycott that followed passage of Amendment 2 lost the state an
estimated ten million dollars in gross business income. Will Perkins, head
of Amendment 2 's sponsoring group Colorado for Family Values, said the costs
would not stop him from trying again to deny legal minority status to gays,
lesbians and bisexuals ... instead, the big numbers confirmed for him the
importance of that effort.
A Massachusetts jury has awarded 1.2 million dollars to a man fired because
of the perception that he is gay. John Walsh has refused to state his actual
sexual orientation, claiming it's nobody's business. He claims that
employees he supervised as manager of housekeeping for Boston's Carney
Hospital were displeased by his efforts to stop their use of racist,
misogynist and homophobic language, and they labeled him gay to make trouble
for him with the Catholic-run institution. Although Massachusetts' civil
rights law has protected gays, lesbians and bisexuals since 1989, Walsh's
case is believed to be the first in which a jury punished anti-gay
discrimination with a civil judgment. The jury award is half compensatory
and half punitive damages. The hospital says Walsh was fired for cause.
Claiming anti-Catholic bias on the part of the jury, the hospital has asked
the judge to overrule the jury's decision, and failing that, will appeal.
Israeli President Ezer Weizman did penance for offensive homophobic remarks
he made in late December in a nationally broadcast speech before a group of
Haifa high school students. He and his wife Reuma met for an hour-and-a-half
on December 23rd with representatives of Israel's national lesbian and gay
group the Society for the Protection of Personal Rights, giving them the same
kind of treatment as visiting heads of other nations. Also present at the
meeting were four gay-friendly members of the Knesset, the Israeli
Parliament, two from the Labor Party and two from the liberal Meretz party.
A group of protestors outside -- some holding signs reading, "homo plus
lesbian equals Meretz" -- chanted throughout the meeting, "Homos go back in
the closet". The meeting was spent educating the President, who is in his
70's, that gays and lesbians are not perverts but regular human beings with
full legal status. Both the activists and the politicians left feeling that
progress had been made and confident that the President would not be
promoting anti-gay legislation. A Weizman aide read his formal apology to
the media, saying, "The president sees legislation which discriminates as
undermining the foundations of democracy, the rules of natural justice, and
the dignity and freedom of man, and he has no intention of encouraging
legislation which leads to discrimination between citizens of the state
regardless of origin, religion, sex or sexual orientation." He expressed
regret for any humiliation that may have been caused and affirmed that all
citizens' dignity, honor and welfare must be upheld.
Australia has its first openly lesbian legislator in Liz Watson, a Green
Party member elected in December to Western Australia's Legislative Council,
the upper house of the state parliament. Watson, who's commonly known as
"Giz", had failed in two previous runs for the lower house, the Legislative
Assembly. She's a carpenter and joiner, a feminist, and a veteran activist
in the areas of peace, social justice and the environment. Prior to the
election, she said, "I want to make it quite clear that I will speak out
loudly on lesbian and gay issues -- my commitment to the community is totally
whole-hearted." She enters the Western Australia Parliament as part of a
major shift of power, as the conservatives lost the controlling majority
they've held in the Legislative Council for the entire 103-year history of
the state.
Even before serious flooding threatened the gay resort area on the Russian
River in California this week, two serious fires had marred the holiday
season for gays and lesbians. In Indiana, an arson fire destroyed most of
the offices of Project AIDS Lafayette on Christmas morning. In Superior,
Wisconsin, the Main Club, long a landmark for the region's gay and lesbian
community, was completely destroyed by a fire December 27th, killing two men
who lived in an apartment over the bar. Several days of intensive
investigation did not find evidence of arson, although the building had
passed all its fire inspections for several years.
A Washington state appeals court threw out a lower court's requirement that
gay father Ward Wicklund not display affection for his lover in front of his
children. The unanimous ruling said, "The evidence showed only that the
children experienced difficulty adjusting after their parents' separation.
But where the only harm is adjustment, the remedy is counseling, not
restrictions on the parents' lifestyle in terms of sexual orientation."
A judge has aborted a legal challenge to Denver, Colorado's new spousal
benefits for the gay and lesbian partners of its employees. Two local
residents who didn't want their tax dollars supporting such partnerships had
claimed that the city was overriding the state's definitions of marriage and
family. In a preliminary hearing, the judge said the new policy didn't even
try to define those terms and ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to
establish a likelihood of success in a full trial. An argument similar to
the plaintiffs' had previously been successful in striking down a past
domestic partners benefits plan in Atlanta, Georgia.
U.S. President Bill Clinton will be re-inaugurated on January 20th, and the
Lesbian & Gay Bands of America will be part of the festivities. When they
played at his first inauguration four years ago, they were the first gay and
lesbian group ever to participate in a presidential inaugural. They're one
of more than a dozen bands chosen from among hundreds of applicants. The
Lesbian & Gay Bands of America includes performers from two dozen gay and
lesbian instrumental music groups from across the U.S., who must pay their
own expenses for the chance to play before the inaugural parade begins.
New Zealand's Triangle Television, after years of trying, has been granted
a non-commercial UHF frequency for the Auckland area. Triangle's primary
mission is to present programming reflecting the diverse lifestyles of gay,
lesbian and bisexual communities in a positive way. To that end, they'll be
broadcasting a substantial amount of both locally-produced and imported
lesbian and gay news, entertainment and talkshows, beginning later this year.
They'll also be giving access to, and seeking participation from, other
groups in the community which rarely have the opportunity to present
themselves and their views in mainstream broadcasting.
And finally ... "Rebel Without A Cause" star James Dean died young, but
he's won a new honor nonetheless: a U.S. postage stamp portraying him was
the best-seller of 1996, with collectors picking up 31 million copies. Only
an entire series of stamps celebrating the Olympic Games sold more. Film
historians rate Dean's sexual orientation as anywhere from primarily gay to
heterosexual-but-experimenting. Certainly Dean told his Korean War-era draft
board that he was gay, an incident he later recounted as his having kissed
the medic. But when asked directly if he were gay, Dean said, "Well, I'm
certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back."
------------*-------------
Sources for this week's report included: The Associated Press; The Boston
Globe; Colorado Online/The Gazette Telegraph; The Denver Post; Independent
Newspapers; The Jerusalem Post/Israel; The Lafayette (Indiana) Journal &
Courier; The (St. Paul, Minnesota) Pioneer Press; United Press
International; USA Today; focusPoint/Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Melbourne
(Australia) Star Observer; Options Magazine/Denver; Queer News Aotearoa
(New Zealand); The West Side Observer/Australia; and cyberpress releases
from the U.S. Postal Service; Escrita en el Cuerpo Archives & Library
Electronic News Service/Buenos Aires; Lesbian & Gay Bands of America;
Triangle Television/New Zealand; and the World Congress of Gay & Lesbian
Jewish Organizations.